Customer Relationship Management: A Comparative Analysis of Family and Nonfamily Business Practices*

It has been reported that family businesses perceive excellent customer service as critical to the future of their businesses. However, little research into the customer relationship management (CRM) practices of family businesses has been performed. In this study, we examine CRM implementation among 82 family and 370 nonfamily firms. Family and nonfamily businesses report similar attitudes toward the importance of CRM, their knowledge of CRM, and their success when they do implement it. However, using a logit regression model, we find that the actual implementation strategies of family businesses are significantly different from those of nonfamily businesses. These results remain constant when controlling for size and industry sector.     

Meeting Planners’ Competency,Motivation, and Benefits: The Case of Korea

The role of meeting planners is essential to the successful completion of a meeting. Their involvement includes coordinating every detail of a meeting, such as budgeting, solicitation of sponsorship, preparation of request for proposals, reservation of facilities or services, translation, and interpretation. Despite meeting planners’ significance, no real effort has been made to identify their competencies, motivations, and benefits. In this study, six competency, four motivation, and two benefit domains were identified. The most important competency domain was the “ability to understand social trends and good manners,” whereas the “ability to perform foreign languages” domain was a relatively low-importance competency. Regarding the benefits, the respondents showed appreciation for opportunities to globalize and gain social recognition by becoming a meeting planner. Compared with the female respondents, the male respondents believed that they had a higher level of evaluative knowledge regarding current competency and specialized expertise.     

Peer network position and shopping behavior among adolescents

Prior research on consumer group behavior has overlooked the importance of peer group structure and the social position of its members in marketing action, especially among adolescents. This study draws on social network theoretical frame to explore the relationship between adolescents’ structural position in peer networks and the decision to shop with friends. Based on a survey of 1037 adolescents, the study suggests that adolescents’ social positions within a peer network affect the frequency of shopping with friends, although gender moderates the relationship. The findings provide practical guidelines for retailers and other managers who target adolescent consumers.     

Brand Love is in the Heart: Physiological Responding to Advertised Brands

Advertising executive Kevin Roberts proposed that premium profits lie in strong emotional connections with brands that engender “loyalty beyond reason.” This study uses psychophysiological measures to empirically investigate the basic premises asserted by Roberts (2005): consumers’ connections with brands are rooted in emotion, and that consumers connect with their own idiosyncratic set of brands. Data support this conceptualization of brand love. Individuals’ unique set of more‐loved brands elicited characteristically positive emotional responses. This was not the case for category preferences. The notion of brand love, which varies at an individual level, is compatible with the current trend toward targeted advertising.     

The effects of external and internal shocks on total factor productivity

This paper examines structural changes that occur in the total factor productivity (TFP) within countries. It is possible that some episodes of high economic growth or economic decline are associated with permanent productivity shocks; therefore, this research has two objectives. The first one is to estimate the structural changes present in TFP for a sample of 77 countries between 1950 (1960) and 2000. The second one is to identify possible explanations for breaks. Two sources were analyzed: (i) episodes in political and economic history; (ii) changes in international trade – a measure of absorption of technology. The results suggest that about one-third of the TFP time-series present at least one structural break. Downwards breaks are more common, indicating that after a break the TFP has much difficulty to recover. When we investigated factors related with structural change, developed countries presented a break near the first oil shock while the developing countries’ breaks are more spread along the decades. Thus, external strikes seem to be more relevant for developed countries. However, for each country and break date, it was possible to find an event close to the break date endogenously detected. Last, the relevance of international trade, measured by trade share percentage of GDP, seems to be limited to explain abrupt changes in TFP.     

On Model Selection Curves

Many popular methods of model selection involve minimizing a penalized function of the data (such as the maximized log-likelihood or the residual sum of squares) over a set of models. The penalty in the criterion function is controlled by a penalty multiplier λ which determines the properties of the procedure. In this paper, we first review model selection criteria of the simple form “Loss + Penalty” and then propose studying such model selection criteria as functions of the penalty multiplier. This approach can be interpreted as exploring the stability of model selection criteria through what we call model selection curves. It leads to new insights into model selection and new proposals on how to select models. We use the bootstrap to enhance the basic model selection curve and develop convenient numerical and graphical summaries of the results. The methodology is illustrated on two data sets and supported by a small simulation. We show that the new methodology can outperform methods such as AIC and BIC which correspond to single points on a model selection curve.     

Application and extension of the Moore and ReVelle Hierarchical Maximal Covering Model

In a paper published in Management Science in 1982, George Moore and Charles ReVelle proposed a location model for siting a hierarchical system of medical facilities. In this paper we apply the Moore and ReVelle Hierarchical Maximal Covering Model to the location of medical facilities in the Kohat district in Pakistan. Optimal solutions of the Moore and ReVelle model are compared against the actual location of medical facilities in this district. We then extend the Moore and ReVelle formulation to include fixed and variable costs for siting and operating the facilities. We compare the solutions of that formulation with the results of the original Moore and ReVelle model.     

Sheldon's Constitutional Theory and Advertising Appeals: A Preliminary Appraisal

Sheldon suggests that a strong relationship exists between physique and temperament or personality. The present study examines the usefulness of physique and temperament as moderators of communication effect. Subjects were exposed to twelve advertisements that captured salient elements of Sheldon's theory. Measures of physique and temperament served as the independent variables while affect toward the advertisements served as the dependent variable. There was a significant relationship between temperament and affect. Physique, however, was not as predictive. It appears that Sheldon's Constitutional Theory can potentially contribute to the formulation of advertising strategies by providing an indication of the appeals that might be relevant.     

Infection and immunization: A new class of evolutionary game dynamics

Building upon a central paradigm of evolutionary game theory, namely the invasion barrier, we propose the new Infection and Immunization Dynamics (InfImmDyn), modelling a plausible adaptation process in a large population. For general games, this yields a novel refinement of the Nash equilibrium concept based on dynamical arguments, close in spirit to Nash's original “mass action” idea in his Ph.D. thesis. For partnership games, InfImmDyn exhibits a better asymptotic behavior compared to other popular procedures like Fictitious Play and Replicator Dynamics. We establish even support separation of InfImmDyn in finite time, which can never be achieved by any interior-point method like those mentioned above. In fact, this property has not yet been established for any other evolutionary game dynamics.